The following abbreviations are herewith defined, at least some of which are referred to within the following description of the state-of-the-art and the present invention.
3GPP3rd Generation Partnership ProjectACRAccounting RequestCCFCharging Collection FunctionCDRCharging Data RecordsCTFCharging Trigger FunctionGWGatewayHRPDHigh Rate Packet DataHSGWHRPD Serving GWIETFInternet Engineering Task ForceIMSIP Multimedia SubsystemLTELong Term EvolutionOCSOnline Charging SystemPDNPacket Data NetworkQoSQuality of ServiceS-GWServing GW
Many consumers use services available through a communication network. The most common, of course, is simple voice or telephone calls. Other services may include, for example, text messaging, the downloading of content or streaming video, or interacting with Web sites accessible through the Internet. While some of these services may be offered free of charge, at least to the user, others must be paid for.
A consumer who pays for services provided through a communication network may be referred to as a subscriber. The subscriber may be required to pay for certain services in advance, for example by credit card, or may be allowed to obtain the services and be billed for them later. In some cases the subscriber may be required to maintain an account balance that service charges may be billed against.
In many cases, charging for the services provided by a network is done on a use-based basis. The more of the services used by the subscriber, the higher the charges will be. Many and various billing schedules are now in use, for example to allow a certain usage level for a fixed rate, then charging on a per-service-unit basis above that threshold. A common service unit is time; the duration of a telephone call in minutes, for example. Other services may be billed on the basis of how much data is transmitted.
In these cases, the network must monitor the service used and perform certain accounting functions. This may be true even in networks that charge only a flat monthly fee, if they nevertheless want to track service consumption for other purposes. As might be expected, standard protocols for network accounting have been developed. In a standard model, a network gateway or similar component receives a service request from a subscriber (or, more accurately, with a UE device associated with a subscriber) and performs some form of authentication and authorization function. If provision of the service is allowed, a service element, perhaps at the gateway, permits the service session to commence and monitors its progress. This service element, which may for example be a CTF in an LTE/IMS network, generates messages when the service begins and ends, and may also do so while session is on-going.
These messages may be called accounting requests and are eventually aggregated and correlated into a charging record. This is often performed by specific network element after a communication session has ended. In the LTE/IMS context, this element is a CDF, which produces a per-CTF aggregated CDR and a per-session correlated CDR based on the ACRs it receives from one or more CTFs that send accounting information for the call or session. Given the importance of the billing function, there are often strict requirements for how quickly this must be done. Unfortunately, processing of all of the accounting requests to produce aggregated and correlated charging records, especially if done in accordance with the severe timing requirements, consumes a great deal of processing power. There may be instances, however, where processing of accounting requests must be given a high priority.
Needed therefore is a manner of reducing the processing burden placed on the network by the processing of accounting requests, while still ensuring that important dependent downstream functions are not adversely impacted by processing delays.
Accordingly, there has been and still is a need to address the aforementioned shortcomings and other shortcomings associated with processing accounting requests. These needs and other needs are satisfied by the present invention.